Mother of 8-year-old girl who died in Border Patrol custody says pleas for hospital care were denied

McALLEN, Texas — The mother of an 8-year-old girl who died in Border Patrol custody said Friday that agents repeatedly ignored pleas to hospitalize her medically fragile daughter as she felt pain in her bones, struggled to breathe and was unable to walk.

Agents said her daughter’s diagnosis of influenza did not require hospital care, Mabel Alvarez Benedicks said in an emotional phone interview. They knew the girl had a history of heart problems and sickle cell anemia.

“They killed my daughter, because she was nearly a day and a half without being able to breathe,” the mother said. “She cried and begged for her life and they ignored her. They didn’t do anything for her.

The girl died Wednesday on what her mother said was the family’s ninth day in Border Patrol custody. People are to be held no more than 72 hours under agency policy, a rule that is violated during unusually busy times.

The account is almost certain to raise questions about whether the Border Patrol properly handled the situation, the second child fatality in two weeks after a rush of illegal border crossing severely strained holding facilities.

Roderick Kise, a spokesperson for the Border Patrol’s parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, said he could not comment beyond an initial statement because the death was the subject of an open investigation. In that statement, CBP said the girl experienced “a medical emergency” at a station in Harlingen, Texas, and died later that day at a hospital.

Alvarez Benedicks, 35, said she, her husband and three children, aged 14, 12 and 8, crossed the border to Brownsville, Texas, on May 9. After a doctor diagnosed the 8-year-old, Anadith Tanay Reyes Alvarez, with influenza, the family was sent to the Harlingen station on May 14. It was unclear why the family was held so long.

Anadith woke up her first day in the Harlingen station with a fever and had a headache, according to her mother, who said the station was dusty and smelled of urine.

When she reported her daughter’s bone pain to an agent, she said he responded, “‘Oh, your daughter is growing up. That’s why her bones hurt. Give her water.’”

“I just looked at him,” Alvarez Benedicks said. “How would he know what to do if he’s not a doctor?”

She said a doctor told her the pain was related to influenza. She asked for an ambulance to take her daughter to the hospital for breathing difficulties but was denied.

“I felt like they didn’t believe me,” she said.

Anadith received saline fluids, a shower and fever medication to reduce her temperature, but her breathing problems persisted, her mother said, adding that a sore throat prevented her from eating and she stopped walking.

At one point, a doctor asked the parents to return if Anadith fainted, Alvarez Benedicks said. Their request for an ambulance was denied again when her blood pressure was checked Wednesday.

An ambulance was called later that day after Anadith went limp and unconscious and blood came out of her mouth, her mother said. She insists her daughter had no vital signs in the Border Patrol station before leaving for the hospital.

The family is staying at a McAllen, Texas, migrant shelter and seeking money to bring their daughter’s remains to New York City, their final destination in the U.S.

Anadith, whose parents are Honduran, was born in Panama with congenital heart disease. She received surgery three years ago that her mother characterized as successful. It inspired Anadith to want to become a doctor.

Her death came a week after a 17-year-old Honduran boy, Ángel Eduardo Maradiaga Espinoza, died in U.S. Health and Human Services Department custody. He was traveling alone.

A rush to the border before pandemic-related asylum limits known as Title 42 expired brought extraordinary pressure. The Border Patrol took an average of 10,100 people a into custody a day over four days last week, compared to a daily average of 5,200 in March.

The Border Patrol had 28,717 people in custody on May 10, one day before pandemic asylum restrictions expired, which was double from two weeks earlier, according to a court filing. By Sunday, the custody count dropped 23% to 22,259, still historically high.

Custody capacity is about 17,000, according to a government document last year, and the administration has been adding temporary giant tents like one in San Diego that opened in January with room for about 500 people.

On Sunday, the average time in custody was 77 hours.

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DeSantis’ weakness as Trump slayer has GOP rivals smelling blood

Next week is poised to be one of the most eventful of the 2024 presidential campaign. Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) today filed his official paperwork to run, in advance of his home state launch event Monday. Ron DeSantis is expected to officially kick off his bid later in the week, when he hopes to be the latest Florida governor to declare his candidacy with a shock-and-awe rollout.

And that might not be the end of it. New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu told Puck this week there’s a “61 percent chance” he runs for president. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum is nearing a decision to launch in the next few weeks. Chatter about a possible Chris Christie bid is rising; the former New Jersey governor said in late April he’d make a decision in a few weeks.

There’s also Hamlet on the James River, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, another political heavyweight who can’t seem to avert his eye from the race.

No seasoned, successful politician runs for president without a theory of the case — a detailed and plausible path to victory. And as more prospective candidates surface, it’s becoming clearer what’s at the heart of those plans: a growing belief within the party that DeSantis is a paper tiger.

At one time, the Florida governor looked to be the candidate best positioned to knock off Trump, en route to finishing off President Joe Biden. DeSantis was Trump without the baggage — and 32 years younger.

He was coming off an epic 2022 reelection victory in the nation’s third-largest state, marked by Florida’s biggest winning margin in 40 years. Officials in both parties did a double take at his robust performance among all Latino groups.

With DeSantis, the GOP could get the same conservative policies as Trump, the same unyielding approach, the same judges, the same trolling of the libs. He was a party leader on Covid. The suburbs would be back in play. So would the five states Biden flipped from Trump in 2020.

But DeSantis’ Disney jihad and his Ukraine-is-a-territorial-dispute stumble have undermined his aura of competence among donors and the business community. Trump’s relentless attacks — none of them answered — and his drum beat of abuse have left the two-term governor bruised. Far from projecting strength, DeSantis suddenly appears to be a candidate who’s thrived in a protective cocoon, isolated from media scrutiny, and surrounded by a compliant legislature afraid to test him.

On the eve of his launch, DeSantis now confronts the perception that he is a porcelain candidate, glazed and decorative, durable enough, but not really built to withstand the blunt impact of Trump’s hammer or the full fury of a united Democratic Party.

Yet the notion that DeSantis is ripe for a takedown is only part of the reason why the presidential race is suddenly looking so enticing. In the three years since Trump lost reelection, there is little evidence to suggest he can win back the White House and much evidence to suggest he’ll drag the party to defeat with him.

This is what a healthy portion of the GOP political operative class — and the donor class — believes. Most of Trump’s primary rivals think it, too. Some of them, like Christie, are willing to say it out loud.

“Donald Trump has done nothing but lose since he won the election in 2016. We lost the House in 2018. The Senate and the White House in 2020. We underperformed in 2022 and lost more governorships and another Senate seat,” he said in a recent radio interview.

DeSantis says it privately. According to a New York Times report, the governor told supporters and donors in a call Thursday that Trump can’t win, pointing to “all the data in the swing states, which is not great for the former president and probably insurmountable because people aren’t going to change their view of him.”

Against that backdrop, it’s not a bad bet to jump in now under the expectation of filling the role DeSantis was once assumed to hold. But there is a sense of urgency: any new entrants must get in before DeSantis has the opportunity to use his considerable resources to make it a two-person primary with Trump. The clock begins ticking next week.

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Prosecutors looking into false reports of veterans displaced by migrants

ALBANY, N.Y. — The state Attorney General's Office said Friday it is looking into reports that a nonprofit organization in the Hudson Valley erroneously claimed that homeless veterans placed in hotels were kicked out last week by migrants bused there from New York City.

The accusation that about 20 veterans were tossed from a Newburgh hotel in Orange County to make way for the asylum-seekers drew national headlines and broad condemnation. But the claims soon began to unravel when the hotel showed proof that it was not housing homeless veterans and that no one was displaced when the migrants arrived.

Sharon Toney-Finch, a disabled veteran who founded the Yerik Israel Toney Foundation, said she was misguided in her initial understanding that veterans under her group's care were moved from the hotel.

"For us not to confirm where they were kicked out of or removed from, that was YIT's fault," she said

The situation also ensnared the local Assemblymember Brian Maher (R-Orange County) who railed against the alleged displacement of veterans after he said he believed Toney-Finch's story that he said was backed up by hotel receipts she showed him from people who stayed at the Crossroads Hotel. But he told the Times Union in Albany on Thursday that he was tricked, saying he was "devastated and disheartened."

A spokesperson for Attorney General Tish James said the office is aware of the situation and is "looking into it" but cautioned that doesn't mean a formal investigation has been opened.

The Orange County District Attorney's Office also warned against any rush to judgment on any potential illegalities.

"As a matter of policy we do not normally comment on the existence or non-existence of investigations where no charges have been publicly filed," the office said in a statement. "However, lying, without more, does not itself constitute criminal conduct, particularly absent any allegations of financial impropriety."

The Mid Hudson News and the Times Union uncovered another twist Friday. Both reported that it appears homeless men from a nearby shelter were recruited by Toney-Finch to act as veterans that had been displaced from the Newburgh hotel.

Toney-Finch told POLITICO that the reports were "a total lie."

Elected officials on both sides of the aisle criticized attempts to claim veterans were displaced as a way to smear migrants who were sent there by Mayor Eric Adams as New York City has been inundated with asylum-seekers.

Gov. Kathy Hochul on Friday called the mistruths "deeply troubling."

"These individuals were sent there with a legal contract between the city of New York and a hotel owner. They are allowed to contract that way," she told reporters in Buffalo when asked about the reports. "And if people want to fabricate stories to undermine the whole process, I think it's reprehensible."

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FBI misused surveillance authorities to investigate Black Lives Matter protesters

The FBI used a controversial foreign surveillance authority in 2020 to investigate whether protesters involved in the Black Lives Matter movement had ties to terrorists, according to two reports declassified Friday.

The revelation that the FBI used these authorities comes amid a tough debate on Capitol Hill on whether to reauthorize the surveillance tool — Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — before it expires at the end of the year, and is likely to make the push for renewal more difficult.

According to a newly declassified memorandum order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, issued more than a year ago, the FBI ran a “batch query” related to 133 individuals “arrested in connection with civil unrest and protests” between May 30 and June 18 of 2020.

The analysts ran these names through information gathered using authorities from Section 702, which allows the intelligence community to surveil electronic communications by foreign individuals located outside the United States for national security purposes. But the data collected also includes information about Americans on the other end of emails or other communications.

Whether to renew Section 702 has been a heated debate on Capitol Hill this year, with members of Congress on both sides of the aisle raising repeated concerns about the FBI and other agencies exceeding their authority and violating the privacy rights of Americans.

The federal government has argued that Section 702 is vital to national security, and noted that it has been used to stop terrorists and cyberattacks, among other planned incidents.

The memorandum noted that the FBI believed the queries on those arrested in connection to the Black Lives Matter protests were “reasonably likely to retrieve evidence of a crime simply because they pertained to persons who had been arrested.”

“The query was run to determine whether the FBI had ‘any counter-terrorism derogatory information on the arrestees,’ but without ‘any specific potential connections to terrorist related activity’ known to those who conducted the queries,” the FISC memorandum reads.

When asked about why this occurred, a senior FBI official told reporters on a call Friday that the query was conducted due to a “lack of understanding on the part of the person who ran it, and that person received remedial training as well.”

The latest reports covered multiple instances of what the FISC deemed to be the intelligence community misusing FISA Section 702 authorities, and was based on data from 2020 and 2021, prior to a series of overhauls being made by the FBI on how that authority is used. These included FBI Director Christopher Wray accepting and implementing almost a dozen recommendations from an internal auditing office to improve compliance.

The FBI published an audit earlier this month showing a decrease in misuse of FISA Section 702 authorities.

The court records indicated that the FBI used FISA data to run a query of 19,000 donors involved in a congressional campaign in 2020. A senior DOJ official said that the candidate involved was not elected to Congress, and that they were running against an incumbent. This revelation comes months after it was revealed that Section 702 was used to look into Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.).

The investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol also used FISA data to understand if foreign influence was involved in the attack, the court documents revealed.

Rebecca Richards, chief of ODNI’s Civil Liberties, Privacy and Transparency Office, told reporters that classified versions of the opinions were provided to Congress last year.

House Intelligence Committee ranking member Jim Himes (D-Conn.) said in a statement Friday that the FISC opinion “provides further evidence that a bipartisan reauthorization of FISA Section 702 must include robust measures to ensure that FBI employees conduct searches of the Bureau’s Section 702 databases in a rigorous and responsible way.”

Spokespersons for House Intelligence Chair Mike Turner (R-Ohio) and leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee did not respond to requests for comment.

— Jordain Carney contributed to this report.

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DeSantis is fighting Disney. Here are some of his other feuds with big business.

Gov. Ron DeSantis made Florida the state where woke goes to die. It’s not looking great for some businesses, either.

The Republican governor’s high-profile fight with Walt Disney Co. is just one of several DeSantis has picked with major corporations — some before even he took office. Now this latest gambit is costing Florida some 2,000 jobs after the global entertainment giant said Thursday it would scrap a $1 billion development plan in Florida.

With DeSantis expected to announce his presidential bid very soon, GOP rivals and leading Democrats are savaging him over the clash with one of the state’s biggest employers.

Former President Donald Trump, who is also vying for the Republican nomination, said Thursday the governor “is being absolutely destroyed by Disney” and that the confrontation was “all so unnecessary.”

DeSantis’ playbook, though, highlights his populist streak and his willingness to push policies — and his politics — even if they lead to brawls with the tourism industry, agribusiness and Silicon Valley. His approach is quickly reshaping the relationship between big business and the GOP.

Here’s a look at some of the other companies and industries DeSantis has fought with.

Norwegian Cruise Line

Norwegian Cruise Line, headquartered in Miami and one of the largest cruise lines in the world, became mired in a long legal fight with the DeSantis administration over vaccine passports in 2021.

The fight centered on a DeSantis executive order that banned businesses from requiring customers to show proof of vaccination. The governor had largely pushed a hands-off Covid-19 strategy and said vaccine passports discriminated against the unvaccinated.

Norwegian Cruise Line, however, fought back and sued, claiming that Florida’s rule wasn’t in the best interests of its customers, among other things. The cruise line faced a $5,000 fine for each violation, which could have totaled millions of dollars in penalties if a ship was full of passengers.

At the time of the fight, Norwegian’s CEO Frank Del Rio told Yahoo News: “It’s beyond bizarre. It’s shameful. I mean, come on, give it up. This is a pandemic we are talking about, people are dying every day, Florida now is the epicenter of the epicenter. What does it take for common sense to rule?”

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, however, eventually sided with DeSantis.

U.S. Sugar

DeSantis has led the fight against Disney for more than a year. But his feud with U.S. Sugar goes back to before he was governor.

U.S. Sugar, based in South Florida, is one of the country’s largest producers of sugar cane and employs thousands of people in the state. As a congressman, DeSantis voted against U.S. Sugar’s priorities — and was one of two members of the Florida congressional delegation to support reforms that included reducing direct subsidies.

As a candidate for governor in 2018, DeSantis railed against his GOP primary opponent as an “errand boy for U.S. Sugar” and last year vetoed a bill focused on Everglades restoration that opponents said was helping the sugar industry.

Tech fights

DeSantis has picked some very high profile battles with tech companies, including some with echoes of Trump’s fights with Twitter and others over being deplatformed and claims of liberal bias.

In 2021, DeSantis pressed the GOP-controlled Legislature to rein in “Big Tech oligarchs” who were pushing a “radical leftist narrative.” Florida lawmakers passed a measure, and DeSantis signed it into law, that banned social media companies from censoring political candidates.

They faced fines of $250,000 per day for deplatforming candidates for Florida statewide office and $25,000 daily fines for non-statewide candidates.

Florida’s law, and a similar one in Texas, have faced legal challenges from Google and others who argue such legislation violates the First Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court last year blocked Texas’ law pending a federal appellate court hearing. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, meanwhile, ruled that Florida’s law is largely unconstitutional.

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Montana TikTok ban faces first court challenge

Montana’s statewide TikTok ban came under legal attack Wednesday just hours after it was signed into law by the governor.

The law firm Davis Wright Tremaine filed the lawsuit in Montana’s federal trial court on behalf of five TikTok creators who live in the state and use the app that’s popular among 150 million Americans.

Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte signed the law that bans app stores from offering TikTok in Montana starting Jan. 1, 2024. Gianforte said the law aims to protect citizens from foreign influence by the Chinese Communist Party since TikTok is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, with app stores facing penalties starting at $10,000 for continuing to offer the app.

While Montana is the first state to fully ban new downloads of the app, the hysteria around the alleged national security threats posed by TikTok has led to more than 30 states banning TikTok on government-issued devices. Congress has multiple bills ranging from a nationwide TikTok ban to legislation empowering the executive branch to restrict TikTok and other apps from foreign adversaries. But momentum has stalled in recent weeks after Republicans and progressive Democrats alike came out against a ban.

The lawsuit, announced Thursday, asserts that Montana has no authority to enact laws based on national security interests, or that infringe on residents’ constitutionally protected free speech.

“Montana can no more ban its residents from viewing or posting to TikTok than it could ban The Wall Street Journal because of who owns it or the ideas it publishes,” the suit said. “Even if Montana could regulate any of the speech that users share through TikTok, SB 419 wields a sledgehammer when the First Amendment requires a scalpel.”

The lead counsel on the lawsuit — Ambika Kumar — represented other TikTok creators in the lawsuit filed against former President Donald Trump’s previously unsuccessful attempt to ban TikTok in 2020. It’s unlikely to be the only lawsuit, as TikTok is also considering its next legal steps.

In fact, the lawsuit notes that federal judges have blocked three separate attempts to ban the app, holding that Trump lacked the authority to block personal communications on TikTok.

“We want to reassure Montanans that they can continue using TikTok to express themselves, earn a living, and find community as we continue working to defend the rights of our users inside and outside of Montana,” Brooke Oberwetter, a TikTok spokesperson, said in a statement on Wednesday.

The Biden administration’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. has been reviewing whether to ban or force the sale of TikTok to a U.S. owner — but efforts have stalled in recent months.

Gianforte’s office continued to defend the law Thursday. “While the Chinese Communist Party may try to hide their nefarious spying and collection of individuals' personal, private, sensitive information under the banner of our First Amendment, the governor has an obligation to protect Montanans and their individual privacy right, as guaranteed by the Montana Constitution, from the Chinese Communist Party's serious, grave threats,” Kaitlin Price, a spokeswoman for the governor, told POLITICO.

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University of California considers hiring undocumented students despite federal ban

The University of California is moving toward employing undocumented students who lack work permits, teeing up a possible test of decades-old U.S. legal norms.

The UC Regents voted Thursday to create a working group that will explore hiring such workers and advise the board on a decision, which it expects to make by the end of November. The board took the vote after meeting for more than two hours behind closed doors with attorneys.

“I want to do the best we can for our students, but I also realized that it does take time,” said board Chair Richard Leib. “We have to go through and analyze and talk to everybody, and make sure we're doing this the right way, so we have the best case forward.”

Allowing campuses to employ such workers could change thousands of students’ lives — and invoke a bevy of court challenges. The ten-campus system would be the first to openly skirt a law then-President Ronald Reagan signed in 1986 that banned employers from hiring people who lack federal work authorization.

A group of students and progressive legal scholars — led by UC law school deans and professors — have argued the Immigration Reform and Control Act does not apply to states. They’ve for months pressured the university’s governing board to allow campuses to hire undocumented students, who’ve been placed in a precarious position since a federal judge in 2021 blocked the Biden administration from approving new recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

“The federal courts have consistently recognized that states have broad power to determine the appropriate qualifications for state positions, including qualifications related to immigration status,” the co-directors of the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy wrote in a letter explaining their theory in September.

The prestigious university system of nearly 295,000 students already provides legal advice, financial aid and counseling to undocumented students. California's Democratic-led Legislature has passed a series of laws since 2001 extending in-state tuition to more undocumented students and making it easier for them to apply for state financial aid, in sharp contrast to Republican-led states.

The latest move by a higher education system with international visibility could be emulated by other universities that market themselves as immigration sanctuaries.

Regent José Hernández said Thursday that UC leadership “identifies UC as a progressive leader in the higher education system. And it is my hope that other states, other education entities will soon follow with us.”

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